


February Words #20: Coast

by StaringAtTheTwinSuns



Series: February Words (2018) [19]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Angst and Feels, Angst with a Happy Ending, Coping, Family, Good Ben Solo, Han Solo Lives, Luke Skywalker Lives, Multi, Old Age, Sequel Trilogy What Sequel Trilogy, The Force, angsty Luke, family life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-20
Updated: 2018-02-20
Packaged: 2019-03-21 17:11:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 750
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13745541
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StaringAtTheTwinSuns/pseuds/StaringAtTheTwinSuns
Summary: coast (verb): to move along without or as if without further application of propulsive power (as by momentum or gravity)Sometimes, when the weight of the world is too much, Luke Skywalker just... drifts away.ANGST.Part of my prompt challenge for February, featuring a happy (-er than the sequel trilogy) OT3, Kylo Ren-free future.But this one is really just angst, and stands alone.





	February Words #20: Coast

**Author's Note:**

> Confession: Luke cutting himself off from the Force (or being cut off from it, but that’s a different AU) was kind of my TFA headcanon... I hated how TLJ handled it, but I wanted to mess with the idea in a different way.
> 
> PLOTLESS ANGST AHEAD.

~40 ABY~

Sometimes, when the weight of the world is too much, Luke Skywalker just… drifts away.

He takes his X-wing out to orbit. Cuts the engines. And then cuts himself free from the Force as well.

It scares him in a way, closing off all of his connections. Snapping them shut, one thread at a time, like blocking the com ports on a corrupted vaporator. But when it’s done, and there is nothing but space, and the relic of a ship and her relic of a pilot, Luke finds a kind of comfort in the void.

It is strange to be old, without the Force to bear him. It is strange to feel the weight of all his years. But he is free, as well, of another kind of burden—the voices of the stars inside his head.

It was his father who taught him to do this.

Luke doesn’t want to think, with what he knows of Vader’s life, how it must have felt for him—both the pain and the freedom. The absence of the Dark Side—which, even to Luke, feels like a cool day at the end of a hard summer—but also the presence of a physical body scarred with too many battles. Too much time.

Luke is older now than his father will ever be.

And against the stars, he is very small.

He is also young. No more adult now than he was at nineteen on Tatooine, sure of something bigger. Something more. He is less sure he will find it now. How can he be so old, and still not grown?

He hides it very carefully, from his family. Puts on the face of the Jedi Knight he knows the galaxy wants—needs—to see. He doesn’t tell them how it startles him still, to see his own blue eyes under hair gone as grey as Uncle Owen’s. How incongruous he finds his own hands on the throttle, the synthskin of the right too perfect, the left too gnarled and lined.

He hides this too: that there is no peace. No comfort, even in silence. That although he is happy, although his life is too full, his heart is as lined as his skin.

Luke has lived with this for forty years. He will live with it, perhaps, for forty years longer.

Surrounded by the Force. By life. By love.

But for now, he just floats, with the stars and his X-wing. Both frozen in time and hurtling forward through it. At one with the universe… and also completely alone.

***

“He’s gone again.”

Ben hates when Luke does this.

Leia does too, but she understands. They’ve bought their son a world where he won’t have to know the pain they did. Ben bears his own scars, from his own good work as a Jedi. But he doesn’t know war. She hopes he never will.

“He’ll be back.” She knows this, too, that whether it takes an hour or a day, Luke does what he does not to run from his family, but so he can truly be there for them. He takes his demons out into the stars, to take them away from their home.

It is the same, in a way, as how Leia fills her days with as many people and places as possible. What Leia always tries to drown out, Luke drowns in, then pushes away.

Han squints at the sky. There’s no way he can see it, but he looks for the X-wing all the same. And Leia gets a flash of something—something old and aching, and she knows that, Force or no Force, Han gets it too.

“Come on.” Leia loops her arm through his. “The house still needs work, before the kids come to destroy it.”

Ben fakes a scowl. “Hey. They’re not that messy.”

“They just take after their father.” Leia smiles.

“Yeah,” Han says, but he keeps looking back over his shoulder.

“Don’t worry,” Leia says. “He’ll be fine. He’s just… clearing out his own cobwebs.”

***

As if on cue, something sparks in the sky. New connections, the purr of an engine coming back to life after being stalled. It sputters a little, scored and scorched by the decades, but slowly, it starts to move forward.

Perhaps its best battles are behind it. Perhaps they aren’t. It has a cargo to carry, either way. And as it enters the atmosphere, its console lights up with incoming transmissions. Friendly voices, welcoming it home.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much for reading! As always, all comments including concrit are appreciated!


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